Commentary; Posted: 11/5/03

An end to bullying will help keep schools safe in Minnesota

By Don Heinzman

The whole issue of handling bullying in the school house is tied in with keeping schools safe. The shooting of two students at Rocori High School in Cold Spring underscores the importance of recognizing troubled kids and dealing with their issues.

There are reports that the shooter at Rocori High School was subjected to some bullying and that this may have been a contributing factor. Whatever the reason, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated and must be punished, despite the shooterís age.

In more than two thirds of 37 school shootings around the country, the attackers felt ìpersecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured,î according to a study by the National Threat Assessment Center, run by the U. S. Secret Service. School officials in the Twin Cities area are taking this matter of teasing and making fun of students more seriously, and itís about time.

For years teachers tended to ignore the complaints of bullied students and thought they should quit whining and take their medicine. After all the saying goes, boys will be boys and girls will be girls.

More than 160,000 students nation-wide skip school every day because they fear bullies, according to figures from the National Association of School Psychologists.

Anti-bullying legislation is being considered in Texas, New York and Massachusetts, although itís not going anywhere because of disputes over the definition.

One issue is the lack of specifying bullying as part of a schoolís harassment policy. Anoka-Hennepin School District is taking the lead in making its entire system bully-proof. This year bullying is defined as repeated intimidation or harassment of a student by another student or group of students.

Under this new policy, if a kid is teased and picked on more than once, the behavior is written up with a copy to the principal. Both the victim and the tormentor talk out the problem. If it continues parents of both kids are brought in, which is a new procedure. If all that fails, the offending student could be expelled.

Doug Hodson, assistant principal of the alternative schools in the district, says the new policy will change how students report bullying and how swiftly those reports are handled.

Some of the worst teasing takes place in the middle schools. At the Isanti Middle School, teachers and students have signed an anti-bullying pledge. Students are being asked in a survey to pinpoint when and where bullying takes place in the building. Itís part of a year-long campaign to alleviate the teasing of students.

At the Princeton Middle School, anti-bullying is a part of the curriculum. Discussion of bullying and its effects is part of a 20-minute daily teacher advisee meeting. The theme for this program is ìCreating a Caring Community.î

This constant attention to the problem is bound to help, and research shows that schools with such a curriculum can cut the bullying instances in half by the end of the second year.

Preventing a kid from bringing a gun into school and shooting a student is difficult, but eliminating the teasing and bullying of potential shooters may go a long way toward calming them, thereby making schools safer for the students.

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